Clear and Present Danger

END CALL. DISCONNECT SIGNAL. END INTERCEPT.

'What's this 'agitation' business?'

'I can't put 'pissed' in an official TWX,' Antonio pointed out. 'This one's hot. We have some operational intel here.' He pressed the transmit key on his terminal. The signal was addressed to a code-word destination - CAPER - which was all anyone who worked in the van knew.

Bob Ritter had just left for home, and was only a mile up on the George Washington Parkway when his secure earphone made its distinctive and, to him, irritating noise.

'Yeah?'

'CAPER traffic,' the voice said.

'Right,' the Deputy Director (Operations) said with a suppressed sigh. To his driver: 'Take me back.'

'Yes, sir.'

Getting back, even for a top CIA executive, meant finding a place to reverse course, and then fight the late D.C. rush-hour traffic which, in its majesty, allows rich, poor, and important to crawl at an equal twenty miles per hour. The gate guard waved the car through, and he was in his seventh-floor office five minutes after that. Judge Moore was already gone. There were only four watch officers cleared for this operation. That was the minimum number required merely to wait for and evaluate signal traffic on the operation. The current watch officer had just come on duty. He handed over the signal.

'We have something hot,' the officer said.

'You're not kidding. It's Cortez,' Ritter observed after scanning the message form.

'Good bet, sir.'

'Coming here... but we don't know what he looks like. If only the Bureau had gotten a picture of the bastard when he was in Puerto Rico. You know the description we have of him.' Ritter looked up.

'Black and brown. Medium height, medium build, sometimes wears a mustache. No distinguishing marks or characteristics,' the officer recited from memory. It wasn't hard to memorize nothing, and nothing was exactly what they had on F lix Cortez.

'Who's your contact at the Bureau?'

'Tom Burke, middle-level guy in the Intelligence Division. Pretty good man. He handled part of the Henderson case.'

'Okay, get this to him. Maybe the Bureau can figure a way to bag the bastard. Anything else?'

'No, sir.'

Ritter nodded and resumed his trip home. The watch officer returned to his own office on the fifth floor and made his call. He was in luck this night; Burke was still at his office. They couldn't discuss the matter over the phone, of course. The CIA watch officer, Paul Hooker, drove over to the FBI Building at 10th and Pennsylvania.

Though CIA and FBI are sometimes rivals in the intelligence business, and always rivals for federal budget funds, at the operational level their employees get along well enough; the barbs they trade are good-natured ones.

'There's a new tourist coming into D.C. in the next few days,' Hooker announced once the door was closed.

'Like who?' Burke inquired, gesturing to his coffee machine.

Hooker declined. 'F lix Cortez.' The CIA officer handed over a Xerox of the telex. Portions of it had been blacked out, of course. Burke didn't take offense at this. As a member of the Intelligence Division, charged with catching spies, he was accustomed to 'need-to-know.'

'You're assuming that it's Cortez,' the FBI agent pointed out. Then he smiled. 'But I wouldn't bet against you. If we had a picture of this clown, we'd stand a fair chance of bagging him. As it is...' A sigh. 'I'll put people at Dulles, National, and BWI. We'll try, but you can guess what the odds are.' If the Agency had gotten a photo of this mutt while he was in the field - or while he was at the KGB Academy - it would make our job a hell of a lot easier ... 'I'll assume that he's coming in over the next four days. We'll check all flights directly in from down there, and all connecting flights.'

The problem was more one of mathematics than anything. The number of direct flights from Colombia, Venezuela, Panama, and other nearby countries directly into the D.C. area was quite modest and easy to cover. But if the subject made a connecting flight through Puerto Rico, the Bahamas, Mexico, or any number of other cities, including American ones, the number of possible connections increased by a factor of ten. If he made one more intermediary stop in the United States, the number of possible flights for the FBI to monitor took a sudden jump into the hundreds. Cortez was a KGB-trained pro, and he knew that fact as well as these two men did. The task wasn't a hopeless one. Police play for breaks all the time, because even the most skilled adversaries get careless or unlucky. But that was the game here. Their only real hope was a lucky break.

Which they would not get. Cortez caught an Avianca flight to Mexico City, then an American Airlines flight to Dallas-Fort Worth, where he cleared customs and made yet another American connection to New York City. He checked into the St. Moritz Hotel on Central Park South. By this time it was three in the morning, and he needed some rest. He left a wakeup call for ten and asked the concierge to have him a first-class ticket for the eleven o'clock Metroliner into Union Station, Washington, D.C. The Metroliners, he knew, had their own phones. He'd be able to call ahead if something went wrong. Or maybe... no, he decided, he didn't want to call her at work; surely the FBI tapped its own phones. The last thing Cortez did before collapsing onto the bed was to shred his plane- ticket receipts and the baggage tags on his luggage.

The phone awoke him at 9:56. Almost seven hours' sleep , he thought. It seemed like only a few seconds, but there was no time to dawdle. Half an hour later he appeared at the desk, tossed in his express check-out form, and collected his train ticket. The usual Manhattan midtown traffic nearly caused him to miss the train, but he made it, taking a seat in the last row of the three-across club-car smoking section. A smiling, red-vested attendant started him off with decaffeinated coffee and a copy of USA Today, followed by a breakfast that was no different - though a little warmer - from what he'd have gotten on an airliner. By the time the train stopped in Philadelphia, he was back asleep. Cortez figured that he'd need his rest. The attendant noted the smile on his sleeping face as he collected the breakfast tray and wondered what dreams passed through the passenger's head.

At one o'clock, while Metroliner 111 approached Baltimore, the TV lights were switched on in the White House Press Room. The reporters had already been prepped with a 'deep background, not for attribution' briefing that there would be a major announcement from the Attorney General, and that it would have something to do with drugs. The major networks did not interrupt their afternoon soap operas - it was no small thing to cut away from 'The Young and the Restless' - but CNN, as usual, put up their 'Special Report' graphic. This was noticed at once by the intelligence watch officers in the Pentagon's National Military Command Center, each of whom had a TV on his desk tuned into CNN. That was perhaps the most eloquent comment possible on the ability of America's intelligence agencies to keep its government informed, but one on which the major networks, for obvious reasons, had never commented.

The Attorney General strode haltingly toward the lectern. For all his experience as a lawyer, he was not an effective public speaker. You didn't need to be if your practice was corporate law and political campaigning. He was, however, photogenic and a sharp dresser, and always good for a leak on a slow news day, which explained his popularity with the media.

'Ladies and gentlemen,' he began, fumbling with his notes. 'You will soon be getting handouts concerning Operation TARPON. This represents the most effective operation to date against the international drug cartel.' He looked up, trying to see the reporters' faces past the glare of the lights.

'Investigation by the Department of Justice, led by the FBI, has identified a number of bank accounts both in the United States and elsewhere which were being used for money-laundering on an unprecedented scale. These accounts range over twenty-nine banks from Liechtenstein to California, and their deposits exceed, at our current estimates, over six hundred fifty million dollars.' He looked up again as he heard a Goddamn! from the assembled multitude. That elicited a smile. It was never easy to impress the White House press corps. The autowind cameras were really churning away now.

'In cooperation with six foreign governments, we have initiated the necessary steps to seize all of those funds, and also to seize eight real-estate joint-venture investments here in the United States which were the primary agency in the actual laundering operation. This is being done under the RICO - the Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organization - statute. I should emphasize on that point that the real-estate ventures involve the holdings